Baker and Mason are graduate students for Medill on the Hill, a program of Northwestern University in which students serve as mobile journalists reporting on events in and around Washington, D.C.
Seventy years after Russell Kirk published “The Conservative Mind,” the center named after him revealed plans to develop a school to train conservative thinkers for the future.
The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal announced The School of Conservative Studies at a Dec. 5 event in Washington, D.C., that was headlined by former Vice President Mike Pence. Pence lauded Kirk as “the intellectual father of the American conservative movement [and] the author of a book we celebrate 70 years now that literally changed the course, not of a movement, but of a country.”
Written in 1953, Kirk’s opus helped fuel the modern conservative movement for decades. The philosophical text promoted ideas like societal order and traditionalism by highlighting prominent conservative thinkers like poet T.S. Eliot and 18th century Irish statesman Edmund Burke.
The book’s 70th anniversary comes as the GOP wrestles with evolving party dynamics. While former President Donald Trump dominates the party, some influential Republicans say he is not a conservative. A recent study by the Associated Press found that just 9 percent of Republicans feel that they can speak openly about their views on college campuses.
One speaker praised Pence’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when he rejected Trump’s calls for Pence to declare that the defeated president had actually won the 2020 election.
“Mike Pence will be validated and honored across the political spectrum for the courage that he's shown on that day,” said John Wood Jr., a national ambassador for Braver Angels, a crosspartisan group focused on depolarization. “You just may not be able to see it in the passions of the moment, but we feel that vindication rising.”
Kelsey Baker and Anastasia Mason
Wood’s comments came the day before 10 Wisconsin Republicans who supported Trump’s false election-win claims in 2020 agreed to acknowledge President Joe Biden’s legitimate election. They agreed to not serve as presidential electors in 2024.
Despite Trump’s dominance in the battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, no one mentioned his name throughout the event.
Representatives of the Kirk Center did not respond to requests for interviews to explain whether their new school (slated to open in 2025) was designed to offer an alternative to the MAGA-dominated Republican Party. However, the center’s director made it clear that he believes the conservative movement needs an intellectual revival.
“Contemporary students have little exposure to serious conservative thought,” said Jeffrey Nelson, executive director and CEO of the Kirk Center. “What's particularly distressing to me, and I know to many of you, is that young conservatives today, many at least, now exhibit high levels of civic and cultural illiteracy. There is then the urgent need for learning experiences that engage intellectual conservatism at its best.”
During the event, a panel of young activists presented their ideas on the current struggles and the future of the conservative movement. According to research from Tufts University, only 65 percent of young Republicans identify as conservatives, compared to 81 percent of older Republicans. In the last presidential election, just 37 percent of voters aged 18-29 voted Republican.
“When they look at conservatism, they assume that it's a stale political philosophy that protects old, withered and sometimes even bad ideas,” said University of Notre Dame doctoral student Elayne Allen, who served on the panel. “And at worst, they see a bunch of reactionaries who dislike any kind of change, and this might be true of some conservatives, but I would argue that thinking is actually quite indispensable to conservatism.”
The panelists said conservative politicians have struggled to draw young people to the polls at a time when the country needs more spiritual and moral guidance.
“The conservatives and ‘The Conservative Mind’ frequently lose the political battle of the moment,” Wood said. “What Kirk is valorizing, oftentimes, is the necessity for standing up for lost causes.”
The push to highlight younger conservatives and create the School of Conservative Studies is at least partly rooted in the ideological divide between generations. While studies have shown that Americans tend to get more conservative as they age, the movement would benefit from younger supporters now, especially after Republicans took major losses in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio in November’s elections.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the Capitol on Feb. 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump delivered his address days after the Supreme Court struck down the administration's tariff strategy, and amid a U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf threatening Iran.
Some MAGA loyalists have turned on Trump. Why the rest haven’t
I recently watched "A Face in the Crowd" for the umpteenth time.
I had a better reason than procrastination to rewatch Elia Kazan’s brilliant 1957 film exploring populism in the television age. It was homework. I was asked to discuss it with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz at the just-concluded TCM Film Festival in Los Angeles. As a pundit and an author, I do a lot of public speaking. But I don’t really do a lot of cool public speaking, so this was a treat.
With that not-very-humble brag out of the way, I had a depressing realization watching it this time.
"A Face in the Crowd" tells the story of a charming drifter with a dark side named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, played brilliantly by Andy Griffith. A singer with the gift of the gab, Rhodes takes off on radio but quickly segues to the brand-new medium of television. He becomes a national sensation — and political kingmaker — by forming a deep connection with the masses, particularly among the rural and working classes. His core audience is made up of people with grievances. “Everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle,” as Rhodes puts it.
The film’s climax (spoiler alert) comes when Rhodes’ manager and spurned lover, Marcia, turns on the microphone while the credits rolled at the end of “Cracker Barrel,” his national TV show. Rhodes tells his entourage what he really thinks of the “morons” in his audience. “Shucks, I can take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them for caviar. I can make them eat dog food, and they’ll think it’s steak. … Good night, you stupid idiots.”
It was a canonical “hot mic” moment in American cinema. But the idea that if people could glimpse the “real person” behind the popular facade, they’d turn on them is a very old theme in literature — think Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (1782) or Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s "The School for Scandal" (1777), in which diaries and letters do the work of microphones.
Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg were very worried about the ability of demagogues to whip up populist fervor and manipulate the masses through the power of TV, in part because everyone had already seen it happen with radio and film, by Father Coughlin in America and Hitler in Germany. But as dark as their vision was, they still clung to the idea that if the demagogue was exposed, the people would instantly turn on their leader in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment for the mass media age.
And that’s the source of my depressing realization. I think they were wrong. It turns out that once that organic connection is made, even a shocking revelation of the truth won’t necessarily break the spell.
In 2016, a lot of writers revisited "A Face in the Crowd" to understand the Trump phenomenon. After all, here was a guy who used a TV show — "The Apprentice" — and social media to build a massive following, going over the heads of the “establishment.” Trump’s own hot mic moment with "Access Hollywood," in which he boasted of his sexual predations, proved insufficient to undo him. That was hardly the only such moment for him. We’ve heard Trump bully the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes.” He told Bob Woodward he deliberately “played down” COVID-19. After leaving office, he was recorded telling aides he shouldn’t be sharing classified documents with them — then doing it anyway. And so on.
Trump’s famous claim that he could “shoot somebody” on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters may have been hyperbole. But it’s not crazy to think he wouldn’t lose as many voters as he should.
In the film, Lonesome Rhodes implodes when Americans encounter his off-air persona. The key to Trump’s success is that he ran as his off-air persona. Why people love that persona is a complicated question. Among the many complementary explanations is that he comes across as authentic, and some people value authenticity more than they value good character, honesty, or competence.
This is not just a problem for Republicans. Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner once had a Nazi tattoo and has said things about women as distasteful as Trump’s “grab them by (the genitals)” comments, and the Democratic establishment is rallying around him because he’s authentic — and because Democrats want to win that race.
Many prominent MAGA loyalists are turning on Trump these days. They claim — wrongly in my opinion — that he’s changed and that the Iran war is a betrayal of their cause. But if you look at the polls, voters who describe themselves as “MAGA” still overwhelmingly support Trump. In short, he still has the Fifth Avenue voters on his side.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.